Mother of All Blackouts

Updated Aug. 12, 2004 12:01 a.m. ET

Saturday marks the anniversary of the blackout that shut down much of the Northeast a year ago. Anyone who lived through that power outage remembers the annoyance of life without lights, air conditioning, TVs, computers and all the other electronic equipment on which a modern society depends. Now, imagine a blackout that lasts for months, or years.

That was the job of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the U.S. from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. The commission, created in 2000 to examine the possibility of EMP...